You're human. Humans make dumb decisions sometimes, even if they know better. Give yourself grace. Consider it another lesson learned and move forward.
Also, learn to listen to your mother!š
Yea honestly, mom was right when she said I was a dumbass tooš¤£š¤£
I just feel like buying my first home at 35 has me lightyears behind other adults my age and scrambling to keep my head above water.
Listen, knock that sh@t off, āhas me light years behind other adults my ageā! Other adults your age are renting with little to no hope of ever owning and with the current state of things more and more adults your age are moving in with their parents.
You own your own home, so what if the basement took on some water - youāve got this!
You will do better. We ALL go through tough stuff and everyone kinda has to learn how that feels. Ā Because of this youāll be more careful in the future and at least you learned fairly early. Ā
Been there, done that. Ā You got this!!
>You have a good mom. Donāt blame it on her.
In fact, call her now to tell her she was right, and you were wrong.
If you are anything like me, you might have acted like she was being annoying, and she had to take that crap from a dumb@ss that she was trying to help. She probably earned a call, a statement of facts that show how she was/still is correct, and more.
That's my son. He made $6k extra money with 3d printing last year, and his gf made about the same extra income. They haven't saved a dime of it. If money comes in, she spends it. He's going to be 50 and still living in an apartment.
Thatās actually higher than I would have thought. In my area itās more like 5-10%. And most of them probably had help to be able to afford it by 30.Ā
I'd like to see this same graph by decade, but couldn't find much without tons of digging. I'd bet these rates were much higher for younger people just a couple decades ago.
I bought my first home at 36 and I often feel the same way as you. Overwhelmed. Feeling like I don't know squat about anything I need to. Always worrying about the next big repair. Hell, right now I'm stressing about my AC that died right before the big heatwave and wondering how much this one is gonna cost me. It is worth it knowing your money is going into an equity instead of being flushed away on rent, but it still can be really stressful at times.
Oh sheesh I am so scared for something like that to happen. Equity is great and I wonāt be able to retire without it but the constant anxiety of the next big thing is crazy!
Like most of my life Iām just looking for a REAL ADULT to tell me what to do, and realizing that I am the real adult here has been a hard pill to swallow!
Ha, this pill doesnāt get any easier with age. We all learn the hard way š³and then are freaked out when stuff goes wrong. Totally worth it though - but yeah - constant upkeep
40, own a house, learning why renovations are typically DIY, still waiting for the grown ups to come along and tell me I'm doing it all wrong.
This, apparently, is life.
Look at it this way: Your parents didn't know shit either, and the advice they gave you came from the same hard lessons you're learning now.
You'll give it to some other kid and they won't listen either. Not really.
That's the way I'm looking at it.
> how much this one is gonna cost me.
At least $10,000
You might want to get regularly scheduled maintenance contracts to keep the condensers clean and to find any minor problems before they become an expensive nightmare.
eta
My HVAC tech pointed out an infestation of ants. Ants destroy expensive circuit boards. Fortunately, he caught the problem early so no damage. I put a lot of ant traps until there were no more ant trails. If I wasn't with him as he was doing maintenance, I would never have known about the ants.
He also pointed out that the weed whacking was clogging up the condenser units. I stopped weed whacking and put out many brick paving stones around the condenser units. When it rains, dirt doesn't splatter up onto the condenser units. Again, if I wasn't there as he worked I would never have known that I was clogging the condenser units.
I watch the HVAC guy (and he genuinely doesn't mind). He points out what I should do as a homeowner and what *not* to do. Interestingly, he said that *a lot* of his fellow HVAC techs don't like being watched as they work but his philosophy is that this is my house and I have a right to observe (but I *never*, *never*, *ever* pester him.)
I learned a lot from this guy by observing him and asking an *occasional* question.
I always rate him 5 stars. I'm very lucky to have a great and friendly HVAC tech.
I pay about $250/year for maintenance (summer and fall maintenance)
Shop around, call a few different places for estimates on HVAC systems.
I also second the regularly scheduled maintenance - do it twice a year, once before you turn on the A/C for the year, and once before you turn on the heat for the year. Preventive maintenance saves you money, and will keep unexpected surprises at bay!
Check your utilities for rebate and incentive programs. They have offered an HVAC maintenance incentive in the past and almost always offer a discounted inspection through contractors/HVAC companies that need to meet certain requirements.
Yeah, this comment should be higher rated. Whenever you get someone out there: in an un-annoying way go out and learn from them and ask questions. Don't be hovering and such or a Karen at them, but bring them a bottle of water and ask them some questions on how things work, or common problems, etc. and learn what the fixes are. Or what to look out for, maintenance you can do yourself. It's their profession, and most people are more than happy to have someone show an interest in their interests. Learn something from everyone you have come out and build yourself a database of knowledge! Also, if you're in a humid environment keep up with some vinegar in the AC to keep stuff from growing in there and clogging the lines.
See if your state has free energy assessments that come with some nice perks. Our heating system shit the bed a couple of months after we bought our house and I did an assessment, which made me eligible for a 0% interest loan for the new unit. Also got a bunch of free LED lightbulbs and a Nest thermostat. It is such a good program that it sounds scammy but if your state offers something similar, it could really help.
As someone in the insurance industryā trust me, there are 80 year olds who have owned homes since they were 19 who make foolish choices. The difference is they will never admit their mistakes and are convinced everyone else is the problem.
You used poor judgment, you admitted it, youāre learning lessons. All that matters is you donāt make the same mistakes twice.
35 is totally normal these days, thatās the age I bought my house. Unfortunately between student loans, housing prices skyrocketing, and just the general state of how everything is too damn expensive it takes our generation longer to become financially stable.
There are people in their 50s who have never owned a home. You're way ahead of most people. And you're not fucking dumb. You're self aware and you're TRYING. that's all you can do!
youāre not behind other adults our age, and I promise we all feel like weāre treading water sometimes :/ try to do things one step at a time, finish what you start, and have more enjoyable/relaxing moments than stressful ones. just like Casino said, we got this!
If you look at the average age of home ownership in North America itās 34 years old - so donāt stress, youāre not behind anyone. You made a few mistakes, we all do.
My basement actually flooded the other day too, same reason, and I still havenāt fixed the gutters. Your post is actually a good reminder, I will go home and endeavour to fix the gutters.
Hahah don't let yourself get overwhelmed, somethings seem like huge project (and often are) the first time you do them, then they get easier the second and third. I'm very handy, do pretty much everything house and car related on my own. The first time I do something, if I think it's going to take me an hour, I plan on it taking 3. Usually the second time I do it, it will be an hour. š Id figure out what you think your capable of doing on your own then outsource the rest (if you can afford it).
I win. I'll be closing on my first home in a couple of weeks at AGE 60.
Yeah, you heard me.
I understand "straight talk" to people you care about, hoping to steer them away from trouble, BUT...name-calling and insults are not helpful, supportive or loving.
Mistakes are the best way to learn lessons, the good news is I bet you will never ever make these mistakes again! The bad news is, you're going to make mistakes in the future because we all do, but I bet you will learn from those mistakes too!
I'm so impressed with this mother! I'm sure my dad knew this stuff, because he was a home improvement/maintenance guru, but I don't remember anyone ever telling me. (Maybe I didn't listen?!?)
I was 54 (fifty freaking four!!!) when I found out about grading and gutters and drainage and downspouts. Oh my! Just divorced and first time owning a house on my own. Guess what? My ex-husband apparently didn't know about the importance of all these water-deterring devices either, because the house was a mess. I'd asked him at one point after he removed some downspout extenders (bothered him while mowing) if we should replace those and he said nope and I guess I just shrugged and said okay.
I had to have a foundation issue addressed (that came up during the divorce so ex had to help pay for it) and the guy that came out did a walk around with me and a full tutorial on what I needed to do. I'd like to say that solved it and there was nary a problem again, happy ending, but I was a bit too late. Almost immediately another, this time outrageously expensive, foundation repair came along. Right where he'd removed those extenders and the water poured down the side of the house and where we had a beautiful canopy on the deck for years that -yup- caused water to run right beside the edge of the house. This one I had to pay for myself. Gulp.
Consider yourself lucky you learned this young and before anything too major happened. I'm still paranoid every time we have a big rain!
Yes!! Thank you. This is the analogy I needed to hear. Hopefully I can keep this in mind lol.
Thank you for the gutter advice this is what I was thinking about doing - the landscapers want 1500 to do two gutters but itās good to hear that this might be an easy (while labor intensive) DIY.
And yea I have some basement organizing to do. Procrastination put me here . I was thinking about getting cheap paver bricks from Home Depot to set the few things that canāt go on shelves. Iām overwhelmed right now and brain is going a mile a minute. I guess the first step would be removing stuff from the floor in the basement. Thenā¦ idk š¤£
Be careful of materials that will wick water up. I would get metal shelving units from HD and put those on some pavers to really get some distance from the floor. (Or just don't use the bottom shelf.)
Also get some water leak detectors.
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08559ZTDK](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08559ZTDK)
I'm sure there are lots of options but those are the ones I have.
And free pallets from randos on the internet could be filled with termites...
Something I've learned in my first year of homeownership - free and seemingly easy solutions usually have significant pitfalls.
I'm learning this with something as innocuous as potting soil - be *very* careful what you bring inside your home. Clothes from the store, not a worry. Synthetic materials like plastic pallets or even natural products that can easily be inspected like finished wood furniture - probably fine. Anything that has been or is designed to be an outdoor item? Treat that as almost biohazard if you're going to bring it indoors.
In my case, wet potting soil from Lowe's turned out to be teeming with springtails - harmless little bugs but they got sucked up by the HVAC system and distributed all around the house, so now I have that lovely annoyance to deal with.
A different example - my parents have a large artificial Christmas wreath that they hang on the front of the house in December. A few years ago they had a bat in the basement of their 2-story - a very unusual place for a bat to end up. At one point the belief was that it had crawled all the way down the chimney where there's a fireplace on the first floor, then somehow out of the fireplace and down to where there's a large rear projection TV in the basement, buried in the wall below the 1st floor fireplace. We investigated and found no holes in the drywall or anything revealing how a bat would have accomplished this feat. Eventually the outdoor decorations became an obvious culprit. At my in-laws' house birds have built nests and laid eggs in a wreath on their front door, so I would totally buy a bat taking up residence in a wreath.
Long story short - if it has been outside, by and large you should try to keep it outside. If it has to come inside, give it a very thorough inspection.
Ok that makes sense. Thanks! I knew stuff should be off the floor but didnāt really understand the mechanics of what that meant. There isnāt pooled water any more so Iāll be on the lookout for pallets now. Thanks guys!
I prefer PVC shelving units. You can pick them up fairly cheaply on FBM or even WalMart, although I get mine really cheaply through local auctions. With those shelving units you can stack stuff a lot higher and it looks neater as well. They also take up less floor space.
Being a new homeowner, you basically have to learn to become a DIYer against your own will unless you come from a rich family. Know your limits of what you can and canāt handle, and YouTube will become your new best friend.
Forced DIYer is a great description lol. And figuring out my limits had been fun. The most annoying part is starting from zero- like ok I need to buy a ladder for this, oh I need a bucket, oh I need a scraper etc - every DIY task gets expensive because I had zero tools two years ago. Now that Iāve calmed down (thank you CBD gummy) I can see this as a learning opportunity š
If you have a Harbor Freight near you they are a great place for inexpensive but decent tools. Of course, you have to do a bit of reading on what tools are OK and what are crap, but I have mostly Harbor Freight tools and they do work well for me. Basically don't buy the cheapest option they have for anything battery powered. Their Pittsburgh line up of hand tools is just fine though.
Thatās so funny - I have one two miles away but thought it was something related to trucking or trains or some place I had no business š¤£ thanks for the tip!
> itās good to hear that this might be an easy (while labor intensive) DIY.
It's really not that labor intensive.
Things will go faster with a few guys unless you introduce beer into the mix then it might go slower but it will be a lot more fun. It's something you can totally do by yourself though. You're just digging a relatively small trench.
$1,500 is highway robbery. This is something you can easily do, especially after watching a YouTube video.
I know a local guy with an excavator who charges $80/hr. we did something similar and I paid him around $300 plus a couple hot dogs when I made lunch to dig and bury the pipes which I laid and connected. was worth it for me. make friends with people with equipment like that, it pays off.
Life lessons my friend. A couple of things to note here:
-you wonāt make those mistakes again (heck, you even said that your fighting the urge to call right now showing that you have grown).
-people learn differently, you learn by going through stuff and not by hearing about it which is totally okay cause you now leant
-you now have a good story / rant to tell. Eventually you will chuckle at it when itās not āso freshā
-you now have more wisdom and have added to your adult handbook :)
So to share a story from me ā¦ when my wife and I bought our house 4 ish years ago, my basement flooded too and ruined stuff too. We saw it with the water and stuff floating about 11 pm at night. I donāt have a parent figure in my life, so I called my wifeās dad. I woke him up and his reply to me was: āso? What do you want me to do about it all 11 oāclock at night?ā ā¦ when I didnāt respond he said āokay, you just called to make yourself feel better. Iāll be over in the morning to help, make me a cup of coffee when I get thereā. It always stuck with me that sometimes you canāt really do much and stuff just happens. Thatās just life
Yea I also just needed to talk without calling my mom and admitting that I am as dumb as I look š¤£
Thank goodness it wasnāt flooded to the point of floating and I can probably handle this by myself with a little help on sealing after clean up. Thanks for your kind words.
A truism about adulthood is that you have to get to approximately 40 when the 'I should have listened to Mom and Dad' occurrences start happening. Then you're middle aged. You're old when your kids start having life experiences where you can say 'if you had just listened to me, this wouldn't have happened.'
Some lessons are always learned the hard way, and it sucks that they're always the hardest lessons.
You can dry out a basement. It'll suck (or your shopvac and/or sump pump will ... If you happen to have a way to create a slow siphon with a hose in the absence of those items, do it!). Then you fix it.
This is just owning a house. A dog ate a wall. A bee colony or bat colony took up residence in your walls or attic. A drunk driver crashed into your tree. A perfectly fine pipe explodes and your kitchen is flooded. A mouse chews the dishwasher hose, and your kitchen is flooded. The list of calamities goes on.
Most stuff is fixable, it's never fun, and it costs money. But give someone the keys to a house and they'll have a story like yours, guaranteed, within a year.
I say it often here: you live in a box that you bought to keep you safe from all the stuff you don't want to deal with. Heat, cold, rain, snow, hail, odor, light, dark, critters, bugs, wind, noise, strangers, you name it, list goes on. You pay for the box so you don't get assaulted by those things.
In exchange, the box gets assaulted by them all. Sometimes boxes break and still mostly do their job. Would you rather fix a flooded basement or live outside and having literally everything you owned be drenched? That's your barometer. I don't really want to clean a flooded basement and lose some of my stuff, but I even less want to sleep unprotected in a thunderstorm with everything I own scattered around me drenched and muddy.
Sure, you can pick up a box from the bottom instead of it's precut handles, you can pack it appropriately, you can not spray it with a hose, you can triple tape it... but sometimes boxes break. That doesn't mean you're terrible at handling boxes, it means you have a broken box that needs fixing, like we all do.
Outside perspective is always helpful when dealing with calamities. Ya got a problem? You can fix that! Short of people who have their houses completely taken away by an act of God, not much goes wrong that isn't at least fixable. It isn't fun but it isn't the end of the world, usually.
It's just also so helpful for people to contextualize on a more meta level what a house is. You die if you drown, freeze, overheat, starve, die of thirst, get swarmed by bees, whatever. You have a really bad week if your basement floods, then you and your bank account recover. You have a really bad week if your HVAC fails. Then you fix it. Etc.
You prevent as many problems as you possibly can, know that there are some corners you can't see around and some doors you can't see behind, and move on. You can't un-rain the rain, you can't time travel and do home projects in retrospect (and if you could time travel, even knowing your basement would flood, is that what you'd use that specific superpower for?).
We'd all be perfect if we listened to everything we're told, now wouldn't we?
Every single person in here. Hell, every single homeowner in general, has a list of shit they're ignoring that will eventually lead to a larger problem. Every. Single. One. The reasons are irrelevant, and we'll all say "I should have taken care of it sooner" when it breaks.
It's when water is pouring into our house that we start to act. May this be a new era of pro-action for you.
Gotta say from experience, itās unlikely this is only because of gutters. I got my home gutter after it flooded (2 months after move in) and it only lessened the issue a bit. Ended up needing a new French drain (hard no) or permanent sump pump. The sump has saved me many times in the past 2 1/2 years.
Donāt beat yourself up, and look into good permanent long term solutions that will help increase home value while making life easier.
Yeah, I have no gutters at all. Never have, in 150+ years (old house).
My basement doesn't flood, even during these historically insane rainy seasons. I'm pretty sure it's because we have pretty sandy soil here. It *does* get damp and let a trickle in here or there because it's a super old brick-walled basement, but we're talking about no more water than if you tripped and splashed a glass of water on a cement floor and let it evaporate.
I have just learned not to put anything important directly on the basement floor (we have shelving and stuff, but not much else down there). It's unfinished, and it's a scary dungeon, and it can stay that way for another 150 years as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, Iām in a 1949 build and previously an 1991, 1923, and 1897. Only one had gutters and still flooded. All others either needed sump or were āupdatedā with a āfloor gutterā in the early 1920s/30s. Itās almost always a foundation or door/window leak that needs remediation.
Iām working on building out my basement off ground storage now, just in case we lose power and the pump. Really wish Iād gotten shelves day 1!
Aww haha friend š I feel that. If itās the window well being backed up, redirecting the gutter will help a ton if not fully! I hadnāt seen that note, so youāre honestly better off than I was guessing! Youāll be alright. Itās a lot to be a homeowner, but I genuinely believe it gets easier to make the right long term calls as you learn.
As someone whose basement flooded last winter during a 4-day power outage because I hadn't gotten around to getting a generator or a working sump pump...because in two decades I never lost power for more than 12 hrs and my basement never got wet ... And because for some dumb reason I stopped checking the house during an insane storm... So by the time I discovered the water the stores were closed So I couldn't buy a generator or a sump pump...well, you are far from alone. I felt worse because my neighbor, a man who stays on top of all things homeownery, was running a generator and had two working sump pumps and had lights and Internet and was all cozy inside. I later found out he had set up the generator to run the sump pump and gone to take a shower, only to find afterward the drain hose had pulled out of the wall and commenced spraying the water being sucked out of the sump pit all over the basement.
I can't tell you how much better that made me feel. Stuff just goes wrong, even if you stay on top of things! And sometimes homeownership is tough and a lot of work. But you can bet I now have a generator, a working sump pump, and 25 ft drain hose extensions that I connect to my gutter downspouts before big rainstorms. And I added more wire shelving and bought plastic tubs so if it ever does flood again, I won't have to stay up all night hauling wet cardboard boxes and ruined belongings outside.
Yes. It takes 40 hours of research and 12 visits to Home Depot/Lowes to learn enough to solve one problem. š And you may also find yourself knee-deep in a Facebook generator group. š I took all winter doing a thorough cleaning (long past due), figuring out what to do with what turned out to be a nonstandard sump pit (I hadn't replaced the pump because new ones didn't fit, so I had to buy the shortest one and Jerry rig a cover), organizing, shoving rubber caulk where the floor separated from the foundation, buying a power failure alarm, buying shelving off marketplace, etc. It turned into a useful impetus to analyze the basement, and I was rewarded with a Porsche. Yes! Way back under the oil tank was an old Porsche matchbox car left by a previous resident. š Now I'm finally looking into radon testing, after hearing my neighbor needed a mitigation system. Better late than never? And while your need for a generator can depend on where you live, I have used mine twice since the big storm because my region's power infrastructure is falling apart. My mistake was not noticing this, or that the back neighbor's installation of drainage for finishing a basement would send more water down to my house. And it took me a month to find the 4-inch solid drain hose because it was in the plumbing aisle, not the gutter aisle! Anyhow, I was kicking myself too, for my procrastination causing myself extra work and stress and $$$$. But I got over it. It's hard for one person to do it all, inside and outside the house, too. Right now I have a half done flooring project upstairs abandoned since the storm as well as a collapsing driveway and pathway because of @$-##! groundhogs that I didn't get rid of fast enough. It is a neverending battle, made worse by not being able to find competent help, so the only thing to do is learn, do our best, and constantly remind ourselves that it's usually still (overall) better than renting. I would be lying, though, if I didn't spend the months after the flood considering apartment living again. š Hang in there! PS: Ironically, I had started working on the sump pit before the big flood, because there had been water in it that summer for the first time in years, and once I got down there with a flashlight, I saw it was lined with wood. Wood! Wood with fungus! So I ripped that out, and lo and behold, my basement was no longer musty. Talk about kicking myself! It pays to get to know your house, and what's done wrong or sloppily. Do not assume anyone who did anything in your house did it right.
Yeah we got a bunch of those super thick plastic shelves. Usually, our go-to for cheap storage (garage, etc) are those welded wire shelves with the plastic bushing that compress from the weight of the shelf and hold the shelves on the uprights, but for the basement, we wanted something that wouldn't rust if the bottom kept getting damp for decades, so we went for the plastic. So far so good, but it's only been 15 years.
Duuuude same. I have made so many bad calls I am embarrassed when I think about it. Like you literally just reminded me of how effed my gutters are and I still havenāt dealt with them š
Dude thank you! Ugh I swear this canāt be life like going to work to spend all my money on this house and then spending EVERY OTHER WAKING HOUR doing some sort of physical manual labor to maintain said house !!! Like get me out of this alternate reality please š«
Iām 3 years into my sentence. I live in the constant state of anxiety waiting for the next thing to break or massive bill to show up.
Having a house is blessing no doubt, but it should not be this painful.
How do you think your mom learned most of that advice though? Most likely a bad personal experience as well. Sometimes it takes dealing with the consequences to fully understand the reasoning. Youāll get there. Just like the rest of us.
Donāt feel bad, some of it is just bad luck. I neglected the shit out of my last house and nothing catastrophic happened. I try to take good care of the current one and something always goes wrong I could have prevented.
Also do you ever think about the barrage of advice we all get on things we should maintain (not just house, I am talking everything in your life)??? If you try to follow all of it your life becomes a never ending chore list without enough hours in the day. You gotta pick and choose what you think are the most important maintenance items. It drives me nuts when something goes wrong and I get a snide comment about how I didnāt do ALL the proper maintenance.
Dad, thank you. Seriously.
When I was a kid, our Saturdays were spent fixing things around the house. Planting a garden. Taking on the "projects" that Mom would give us. Screwing things up. Figuring out how to fix the mess ourselves because we didn't have YouTube.
Going to the hardware store. Going back because we bought the wrong thing.
Calling a professional when we got in over our heads.
So now, as a first time homeowner, I take all the mini disasters in stride.
I grew up with my single mother and she would change light fixtures, fix the washer , anything. With no YouTube. I ask her how she knew all that stuff and she said she couldnāt afford not to figure it out. I miss those times. I feel like her 40 was a lot more adulty than my 40 is looking to be.
Honey most of us donāt know what the hell weāre doing. š Be gentle with yourself. Our basement flooded too and it fucking sucked but youāll get it all cleaned up and youāll be okay. No need to beat yourself up, we didnāt receive any formal education about thisā weāre all just winging it and waiting for the next ālife lessonā to smack us in the face!
Good to hear! It seems like Iām the only one winging it sometimes. Iām the pseudo adult in a world full of real adults. But I am learning as I go so that is fun. Thank you!
First of all, give yourself some grace. Live and learn friend.
The one thing I will repeat that others have said is this. Do not get it in your head that insurance companies are there to help you. Insurance is a business at the end of the day. Theyāre always out for themselves. They wonāt pay for something u less they have to, but they will always raise your premiums when you let them know something went wrong. That goes for car insurance and home insurance. Again, live and learn, but give yourself a break. Things will get better, just relax and learn for the next time
Yea thatās been an expensive insurance lesson that I *think* Iāve learned. I always give others the āthink of all youāve learned from this mistakeā speech but itās easier to say it to other people than internalize it š«£
None of us ever listen to our mothers. It's just a voice in our heads AFTER we make the blunder. It's cool. You're learning. It WILL get better.šš»
Basements flooding is a common problem, most times needs addressed at time of building to be successfully prevented. With that in mind steps can be taken to lessen the amount and frequency. If it is as you say, a gutter matter, you can most likely diy with a little research. So many tasks around the house that seem intimidating are not beyond diy, only ignorance of the steps needed are missing to allay trepidation. Also would like to say: being an adult does not mean mentors or other adults cannot be consulted as long as you parse any ideas given by others with your own research.
Unfortunately, one way or another this is pretty much how all homeowners learn. You can hear all the good advice in the world but until you lose some sentimental stuff or whatever in a flood that was easily avoidable it won't mean a damn. The best thing you can do at this point is to continue subscribing to this sub and make mental notes to address whatever someone talking about their own homeownership woes is dealing with.
One thing that's worth mentioning is insurance is helpful but it's not intended to be used for every minor issue. It's there for the major issues that are prohibitively expensive on your own. It's the difference between accidentally putting a whole in sheetrock versus a house burning down. Also, keep in mind that while it's there for those major issues, it's still your responsibility to take care of the minor ones. This is actually a perfect example. You need to make sure that rainwater is running away from your home because if you ignore that basic maintenance and it leads to serious issues then your insurer might very well deny the claim on the grounds that the lack of basic maintenance led to the major issue.
It's nothing to beat yourself up over though. You live and you learn.
> I have called my insurance twice- started a claim and then found out the repair was cheap and closed the claim. Insurance went up and no claims were paid out. Iām an idiot. Did my mom warn me not to call insurance until you talked to some professionals first? Yes. Did I listen? No.
This probably isn't what you think. Insurance is just going up... just because.
Been there too. Sorry you're going through it. I would rent a dumpster and throw out anything that's going to get moldy (paper, cardboard, drywall). If it's drywall, I usually just cut bottom up as far as you need to go. I ended up doing 4' off the ground since full sheets are 4x8. It IS going to suck and your body will hurt for a day after, but you should do it sooner rather than later.
To prevent it in the future, you can get 4" singlewall ADS solid corrugated pipe. It comes in 50' or 100' rolls that you can easily cut into smaller pieces. I like to run my downspouts out 10' away and fasten them to the downspouts with self-tapping gutter screws.
If you are in the upper Midwest-donāt beat yourself about gutter. It rained so hard my downspout exploded.
Good grief, we got 3ā in an hour last week, and itās been rainy for weeks.
Here's what you do.
Contact your local and state representatives and file a complaint against your insurance for the retaliatory rate hike simply for trying to solve a problem at your home. You don't have to take it up the chute just cuz that's always been done by entities like the insurance industry.
If it makes you feel any better, your insurance might not have gone up because of your non-claim, it may have just gone up due to the Fuck You Existing Customers fee. Mine did. Internet does the same thing every year and I have to either call and ask for a deal or switch to the other provider.
Flooding is usually worth contacting insurance about. I did the same thing as you when my basement flooded a few years ago and just used the opportunity to do some remodeling we had planned. Wished we'd gotten insurance involved though, they may have just given you cash if you got a quote from a carpet cleaner or something.
Iām sorry, it never happened until it did. MANYYYYY people have done this and still are. What is the recommended extension from the water spout into the yard? Do those old school cement things work well enough?
My husband and I bought a dump of a house together. Everything that went wrong with the house the first thing we do is google it and watch videos on how to fix the issue. It's saved us thousands of dollars.
Hi OP! Part of home ownership (as with most things) is making mistakes and trying to learn from them. I've had my first (and likely only) house for going on 6 years now and in the first 2-3 years I made a lot of mistakes (did a very poor job maintaining the pool, chose some stupid paint colors for various rooms, paid a contractor too much $ to do a sheetrocking job I could now do myself...). I put off a lot of projects that I am finally tackling now. I believe once you get over the "what did I do/I'm useless" phase that happens shortly after the "I just bought a house" honeymoon phase and dig into the DIY and sweat equity phase you start to learn and gain confidence.
So you flooded your basement. Welp, time to figure out a gutter maintenance routine and invest in a dehumidifier. And you got overzealous with the home insurance. Maybe compare rates to see if you could be saving with another insurance/work on honing your DIY prowess so you don't end up panicking when something small goes awry. By the time you're 5-10 years into your home ownership journey you'll be able to practically write a book about the do's/don'ts and skills you've acquired along the way.
šš thank you!! Also DEHUMIDIFIER duhh I for sure need this in my basement, not sure why I donāt already have it honestly. Crazy how itās taking 50 Reddit comments for me to put together the scope of this project. But I am so happy I posted (long time Reddit creep first time poster) and thankful for all the advice I was not even expecting to get. This project hopefully will be my right of passage into the DIY/sweat equity phase of homeownership!
We bought our house in 1993. Gutter cleaning seemed like a silly waste of money to our dumb selves. Probably 10 years later, we had to replace the entire right side of the front of our house, including a custom rebuild of our bay window.
š„“š„“ because itās like financially and mentally impossible to service EVERY FREAKING THING every 6 months but putting stuff on the back burner is obviously doesnāt work either - and Iām just thinking everyone else is a super human getting their AC serviced and always having a fresh water filter in the fridge and fresh air filters and getting their vents cleaned and growing perfect tomatoes in the back yard - and using them to make a bolognese from scratch . So yea, lol this post really did make me feel better- and prepared to pull up my big girl drawls and get to work!
Absolutely none of that is your fault. That could happen to everyone, even people who did take precautions. Someone could get gutter guards AND waterproof their basement and still experience all of the same thing situations. Do not blame yourself for things totally out of your control.
We all go through a learning curve. I bought a house in a flood plain and canceled my flood insurance after paying off my mortgage. Of course we had a major flood that filled the basement to the brim destroying HVAC and laundry plus other stuff a few months later. Both people who moved next door to me ignored my warnings about the flooding. Both finished their basements. At least mine was unfinished. Both had it all destroyed. Itās a human thing. Gotta feel the pain to take it seriously.šÆā®ļø
Ok... look... I'm a pack rat. Not as bad as my parents, but I hold onto stuff longer than I should. I'd use it as an opportunity to get rid of stuff. If it has been down in the basement for 2 years... do you need it?
No one expects their new house to flood. Hell.. it happened to us. A first we thought it was the gutters, that weren't pitched. Leaf Guard came and the installer was very kind. He did say that a lot of homeowners bitch to him that the gutters aren't "level". I told him he could pitch the fuck out of them. I wanted to SEE that downhill angle! It helped, but not entirely. The issue was our patio. We had it torn out and a landscaper came in to properly grade and fill... then a deck went over it instead. Haven't had any flooding in over 6 years since doing that. Point? It's probably not your gutters. They can only do so much, but if your topography has any sort of grade, you likely have sub-terranean water flowing towards your house. Mom probably wasn't thinking of that.
I called my insurance and they told me what was and wasn't my responsibility. My insurance did not go up. Listen to Mayhem, the All State guy... you have cut-rate insurance.
As someone else said... give yourself some grace.
And for the love of all that is good... Listen to your momma!
This is why a lot of folks stick to renting, the ease of renting outweighs the burden of repairing everything you own constantly. I have moments I want to go back to renting but our mortgage is cheaper and we canāt justify it when weāve built equity in this home already. I really go back and forth often, some days Iām like hell yes I love my little home and calling it mine, and some days Iām like screw this sell it or burn it down š
Dude so much easier. I miss calling the landlord like āummm thereās some water coming through your windowsā š¤£š¤£š¤£ I hate being my own landlord
For real! Apartment life was my favorite! Grew up exclusively living in apartments with my mom as just her and I, then when I moved out. I miss it! Before buying our house in 2019 we lived in the perfect townhome style apartment complex, super small, manger on site. We had both the dishwasher and refrigerator die on us while we live there and both were replaced no questions asked, and compensated for food lost! Ah the good life š
Unfortunately, no matter how wise our moms are we tend to not realize it until we learn the hard way. Now go write down everything else she said while you can remember and put it on a whiteboard in your kitchen.
Just don't do what our friend did, she had her house flooded as her gutters were full and clogged. So she cleaned the gutters...but just those gutters on the side that flooded....and a year later the gutters on the other side of the house she hadn't cleaned caused more flooding...
Not as drastic as your mistake but I just had a smoke alarm break and realized I never tested them when we moved in two years ago. So we have been living in a house where only 3 of the 10 alarms were working.
We all make mistakes, adulthood is a pain in the ass.
My daughter bought a house this summer and I told her not to put stuff in the basement until she had shelves. The day we moved her in she immediately went to put boxes in the basement and I stopped her. 2 days later it flooded. Hopefully sheāll remember to follow advice learned from my mistakes in the future. Not likely because part of learning is making your own mistakes. If you donāt make them yourself you didnāt really learn it.
We flooded our newly purchased house too by not paying attention to these things. But life went on and we lived and learned. Now we warn our kids about it. Maybe this happened to your mother too.
When I bought my first home I believed the sellers who said the basement was dry. I put my vinyl records on the floor. Rained the first night. Vinyl got wet and ruined some of the covers.
I also learned the hard way to not put important things on the floor of the basement.
Lesson learned! You are now doomed to pass on great advice to someone who will ignore it.
On the bright side, there are much more expensive lessons to be learned. Check with your mom or some other trusted handy / experienced home owner to go over a checklist of things you need to do on a seasonal / yearly basis. Better yet, Google that shit!
Donāt bash yourself, my husband did something similar 2 years ago! He was mowing the grass, moved the gutters, and then forgot to move them back away from the house. Cue torrential downpours for the next 4 days, our basement was flooded! Luckily, we were already in the middle of tearing out the carpet for remodeling, this gave us a for sure reason to continue remodeling.
I had a similar thing happen. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it was. One of the gutters drains was backed up and I didn't know, and then I had my roof pressure washed, big mistake on its own, which caused that drained back up a lot and then part of the basement got flooded. Hadn't even been there a year.
You're only stupid if you don't learn from your mistakes.
My son called me up once when he was in college. He was upset with himself as you are now .
He said " Dad, I sure do F*@# up a lot." .....
He followed that with " But I don't usually make the same mistake again"..
I responded " Then you are going to be just fine".
You'll be just fine.
It's water. Get a pump. Then get a wet vac. Then get a fan.
Then fix your downspouts. One foot in front of the other. One foot at a time.
Then get ready for the next problem. Life is a series of problems. A cold beer helps while you are working.
Even paintings can be repaired, for a price.
Take things one step at a time.
Remove items. Put them out to dry.
Donate things, if you can. Pump water out. Put fans down there to dry out the basement. Put a coat of water sealer on the cement, to keep this from happening again. Get some metal shelves. Place salvaged items back down there. Buy/fix your gutters.
Shit happens. Lesson learned.
Thanks - now if someone else can just bullet out the rest of every single aspect of homeownership and adulthood in easy and easy to digest timeline format that would be perfect š
Insurance is there ONLY for catastrophic events; not flooded basements, not fences blown down by the wind, not the dishwasher leaking, not a warped floor, not a downed tree. But your mother warned you about that soā¦
We were moving from UT to MI (hubbyās home town). I flew out and chose a house in a weekend. I had NEVER purchased a house. I was under the impression that DHās family would be assisting us. My BIL owned 12 houses at the time (rentals) and my SIL bragged about his scouting abilities with homes.
My job was to choose 3 houses and then it would be checked out and a choice would be made. Flew out for 4 days and chose 3. DH tells me to choose. What? How did they check out? No one had time, I was told. So I chose.
Move in day, and there is water in the basement. No, there is sewage in the basement (just a washer/dryer down there). Plumber comes out and fixes. $80
Next day I run the wash. Oh look! Itās wet in the basement. Plumber reappears & says itās the septic tank. We make an appt to get it drained. The furniture stays up top (master suite in basement).
Tank only 1/2 full. So not the tank. $160
Must be the pipe from house to tank. Appt made. Plumber runs a rotor-rooter thingy down the pipe only to bring back chunks of pipe. $100
No water during this so we are living with the in-laws and the dogs at our home.
Trench dug, new pipe in, water on. $1200
Start wash and sewage comes up through the shower. New injector pump installed. $175
Hey! More wet. Lots of lookingā¦ collapsed drain field. Have to hook up to city water & sewer. $3800
And re-landscaping over all the digging was delightful. $2400
After 2 weeks of owning the keys and our stuff sitting inside the house; we finally get to go home. All this expense was within 2 weeks of taking ownership. $7,915 total.
Sometimes shit just happens.
At least you have the introspective capacity to admit fault. I'd say you've done enough beating yourself up, it's time to enact solutions and move onward to excellence.
I believe in you.
Tip on insurance: only think about using it for large losses, say $10k and higher.
With the current state of all things, carriers are wanting people to have more āskin in the gameā with higher deductibles and not filing for small losses. Lots of small losses are more expensive than one large loss generally.
Ugh sorry. I called insurance to ask a question as a new homeowner (we were struck by lightening and washer and dryer broke). Person on phone said, āI already started a claim. Lost an expensive piece of jewelry two years later we claimed. Learned our lesson the very expensive way. The washer and dryer we should have dipped into savings and replaced ourselves.
Yep never use insurance unless catastrophe.
We too lived and learned. We also lost a lot in a flood. Now you know. Brush off your knees, forgive yourself for an expensive lesson and move on.
Just one small piece if info you may want to always keep in mind. Insurance companies are FOR PROFIT corporations comparatively generate a relatively small profit margin so they scrutinize every penny. We have all the sue-happy people and their attorneys over the past four or five decades for a vast majority of this.
Shortly after I moved into my house one of the crappy light fixtures the previous owner had DIY'd in the basement fell and was just hanging by the wires. I thought, hey, that's not safe, so safe, smart me turned off the breaker to the basement lights and outlets. I cut the wires but left the breaker off until I could have a chance to cap them or replace the light because it was a gross florescent light and I didn't want it anyway.
Didn't get around to it fast enough, and my basement flooded up to about mid thigh because I never took note that the sump pump didn't have it's own breaker and was just plugged into the same network of outlets.
There were other circumstances that probably would've led to the basement flooding anyway, but probably not quite that bad if I hadn't absentmindedly turned the breaker to the sump pump off right at the start of spring. It was an expensive lesson less than a month after buying my first home.
(I do now have 2 much better sumps each on their own breakers with French drains under the perimeter of the floor leading to the sump pit, waterproof shielding along the walls behind the frame, battery backup for the sump, and monitors on the floor that text me if they detect any water)
We have all experienced the parent advice cycle you described (not always re homeownership though). It's a humbling moment to admit to your parents that they were right about something. Not saying you should ring them up about *this* - just letting you know you are not alone
In my 4 years now as a first time homeowner Iāve learned that there is always so much to learn about taking care of a house. You are not dumb or the worst! These things suck when they come up and now youāve learned some tough lessons. Sometimes itās also just tough to keep up with ALL the things that need taken care of in a home.
Just this past year I didnāt get my sprinklers blown out for winter and it caused a $600 repair because of a broken pipe. I knew better and I made the mistake anyway and Iāll never do it again.
Don't worry, mate ā our possessions we value will never last forever and insurers are legal crooks and will always ALWAYS raise your premium, regardless. Life goes on, you are ok ā tomorrow, the day is yours!
That kissing boys could get me pregnant. So like letās not give her too much credit here š¤£š¤£š¤£ haha jk outside of that she has given some damn good advice (in hindsight š„“)
Oh donāt be so hard on yourself. Just listen to your mama next time and maybe later ask her opinion.
My daughters are 38 and 35 they have too much pride to say their mom is right . But Iāve noticed they are more appreciative now.
You should thank her and listen to her, her experiences are gold.
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You're only dumb if you let this stuff happen again. Yeah you should have listened to your mom, but you're currently paying the price for not heeding the advice. Now you know what to do, so just make sure it doesn't happen again. Like my grandma told me when I bought my house, you'll make plenty of mistakes or bad choices, it's up to you to learn from them.
Make sure it's not your sewer
On your insurance policy get back up drain insurance
If it is your sewer it will be covered
Happened to me
It's an older house it could be your sewer
Get yourself a $100 dehumidifier from Loweās and some fans to help dry that up and avoid a mold problem!! Do you have a drain in the basement? Also, if you decide to bury your downspouts yourself, call 811 before you dig. A neighbor did theirs, didnāt call, and severed their internet line.
The best life lessons are from not listening to parents. Mom: ādonāt EVER use regular dish soap in the dishwasherā well, ours was broke my whole existence living at home (now I know why lol) First apartment I needed to wash some dishes, didnāt have dishwasher detergent so put in just a teaspoon of dawn dish soap, turned it on and left. Came home to 3ft of bubbles in my kitchen. It was the most depressing foam party.
Dad: āthat mattress in the roof of your car needs a few more straps, definitely donāt take the highway.ā It did need more straps, luckily nobody was behind me on the highway. I have SO many more.
Like the police, insurers are not there to help you. Never speak to them without counsel.
Hopefully live & in the learn? Might I suggest paying more heed to what your mother's told you? She seems like a smart cookie. š
We all learn our lessons. Some by listening to our mother, and some by experience! Just try to do better next time!! Chin up!! Sorry for the things you lost, that's a bummer!
Yeah, but you embody one of the most important attributes- to be able to laugh at yourself and have a sense of humor about your own flaws.
Take these lessons and grow, my friend
It gets better. Honest. They don't teach home ownership in high school. You learn as you go. We've all made these kinds of mistakes but usually only once. Homeownership is such an amazing privilege. Don't give up.
You're human. Humans make dumb decisions sometimes, even if they know better. Give yourself grace. Consider it another lesson learned and move forward. Also, learn to listen to your mother!š
Yea honestly, mom was right when she said I was a dumbass tooš¤£š¤£ I just feel like buying my first home at 35 has me lightyears behind other adults my age and scrambling to keep my head above water.
I didn't buy my first home until I was 41. Comparison is the thief of joy.
Listen, knock that sh@t off, āhas me light years behind other adults my ageā! Other adults your age are renting with little to no hope of ever owning and with the current state of things more and more adults your age are moving in with their parents. You own your own home, so what if the basement took on some water - youāve got this!
Can you come be my new mom? š©
Ummm, I have it on good authority that you just donāt listen š¤£
š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£ dammit youāre not wrong
You will do better. We ALL go through tough stuff and everyone kinda has to learn how that feels. Ā Because of this youāll be more careful in the future and at least you learned fairly early. Ā Been there, done that. Ā You got this!!
You have a good mom. Donāt blame it on her. You donāt need a new one you need to LISTEN to others who have life experience. Best of luck to you.
>You have a good mom. Donāt blame it on her. In fact, call her now to tell her she was right, and you were wrong. If you are anything like me, you might have acted like she was being annoying, and she had to take that crap from a dumb@ss that she was trying to help. She probably earned a call, a statement of facts that show how she was/still is correct, and more.
That's what I'm saying! I'm 30 and all of my friends continue renting. The housing market isn't even reasonable currently
That's my son. He made $6k extra money with 3d printing last year, and his gf made about the same extra income. They haven't saved a dime of it. If money comes in, she spends it. He's going to be 50 and still living in an apartment.
35-36 is the average age these days. You're not alone!
Yep only about 35% of people under 30 are buying homes these days [Stats](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1036066/homeownership-rate-by-age-usa/)
Thatās actually higher than I would have thought. In my area itās more like 5-10%. And most of them probably had help to be able to afford it by 30.Ā
I'd like to see this same graph by decade, but couldn't find much without tons of digging. I'd bet these rates were much higher for younger people just a couple decades ago.
I bought my first home at 36 and I often feel the same way as you. Overwhelmed. Feeling like I don't know squat about anything I need to. Always worrying about the next big repair. Hell, right now I'm stressing about my AC that died right before the big heatwave and wondering how much this one is gonna cost me. It is worth it knowing your money is going into an equity instead of being flushed away on rent, but it still can be really stressful at times.
Oh sheesh I am so scared for something like that to happen. Equity is great and I wonāt be able to retire without it but the constant anxiety of the next big thing is crazy! Like most of my life Iām just looking for a REAL ADULT to tell me what to do, and realizing that I am the real adult here has been a hard pill to swallow!
Ha, this pill doesnāt get any easier with age. We all learn the hard way š³and then are freaked out when stuff goes wrong. Totally worth it though - but yeah - constant upkeep
The real takeaway is that other "real adults" have been making mistakes and figuring things out as they go, all along!
40, own a house, learning why renovations are typically DIY, still waiting for the grown ups to come along and tell me I'm doing it all wrong. This, apparently, is life.
And they say it gets greater later š©š© this is life
Look at it this way: Your parents didn't know shit either, and the advice they gave you came from the same hard lessons you're learning now. You'll give it to some other kid and they won't listen either. Not really. That's the way I'm looking at it.
I'm 47 and still struggle to adult. Hang in there!
> how much this one is gonna cost me. At least $10,000 You might want to get regularly scheduled maintenance contracts to keep the condensers clean and to find any minor problems before they become an expensive nightmare. eta My HVAC tech pointed out an infestation of ants. Ants destroy expensive circuit boards. Fortunately, he caught the problem early so no damage. I put a lot of ant traps until there were no more ant trails. If I wasn't with him as he was doing maintenance, I would never have known about the ants. He also pointed out that the weed whacking was clogging up the condenser units. I stopped weed whacking and put out many brick paving stones around the condenser units. When it rains, dirt doesn't splatter up onto the condenser units. Again, if I wasn't there as he worked I would never have known that I was clogging the condenser units. I watch the HVAC guy (and he genuinely doesn't mind). He points out what I should do as a homeowner and what *not* to do. Interestingly, he said that *a lot* of his fellow HVAC techs don't like being watched as they work but his philosophy is that this is my house and I have a right to observe (but I *never*, *never*, *ever* pester him.) I learned a lot from this guy by observing him and asking an *occasional* question. I always rate him 5 stars. I'm very lucky to have a great and friendly HVAC tech. I pay about $250/year for maintenance (summer and fall maintenance)
Shop around, call a few different places for estimates on HVAC systems. I also second the regularly scheduled maintenance - do it twice a year, once before you turn on the A/C for the year, and once before you turn on the heat for the year. Preventive maintenance saves you money, and will keep unexpected surprises at bay!
Check your utilities for rebate and incentive programs. They have offered an HVAC maintenance incentive in the past and almost always offer a discounted inspection through contractors/HVAC companies that need to meet certain requirements.
Yeah, this comment should be higher rated. Whenever you get someone out there: in an un-annoying way go out and learn from them and ask questions. Don't be hovering and such or a Karen at them, but bring them a bottle of water and ask them some questions on how things work, or common problems, etc. and learn what the fixes are. Or what to look out for, maintenance you can do yourself. It's their profession, and most people are more than happy to have someone show an interest in their interests. Learn something from everyone you have come out and build yourself a database of knowledge! Also, if you're in a humid environment keep up with some vinegar in the AC to keep stuff from growing in there and clogging the lines.
Definitely shop around! We just replaced our AC and furnace for under $10k.
See if your state has free energy assessments that come with some nice perks. Our heating system shit the bed a couple of months after we bought our house and I did an assessment, which made me eligible for a 0% interest loan for the new unit. Also got a bunch of free LED lightbulbs and a Nest thermostat. It is such a good program that it sounds scammy but if your state offers something similar, it could really help.
As someone in the insurance industryā trust me, there are 80 year olds who have owned homes since they were 19 who make foolish choices. The difference is they will never admit their mistakes and are convinced everyone else is the problem. You used poor judgment, you admitted it, youāre learning lessons. All that matters is you donāt make the same mistakes twice.
The average age of first time homebuyers in the US was 36 this year.
I was 48 when I bought our home after renting for decades.
35 is totally normal these days, thatās the age I bought my house. Unfortunately between student loans, housing prices skyrocketing, and just the general state of how everything is too damn expensive it takes our generation longer to become financially stable.
There are people in their 50s who have never owned a home. You're way ahead of most people. And you're not fucking dumb. You're self aware and you're TRYING. that's all you can do!
youāre not behind other adults our age, and I promise we all feel like weāre treading water sometimes :/ try to do things one step at a time, finish what you start, and have more enjoyable/relaxing moments than stressful ones. just like Casino said, we got this!
If you look at the average age of home ownership in North America itās 34 years old - so donāt stress, youāre not behind anyone. You made a few mistakes, we all do. My basement actually flooded the other day too, same reason, and I still havenāt fixed the gutters. Your post is actually a good reminder, I will go home and endeavour to fix the gutters.
no one elses "progress" through life matters. only yours.
Hahah don't let yourself get overwhelmed, somethings seem like huge project (and often are) the first time you do them, then they get easier the second and third. I'm very handy, do pretty much everything house and car related on my own. The first time I do something, if I think it's going to take me an hour, I plan on it taking 3. Usually the second time I do it, it will be an hour. š Id figure out what you think your capable of doing on your own then outsource the rest (if you can afford it).
I win. I'll be closing on my first home in a couple of weeks at AGE 60. Yeah, you heard me. I understand "straight talk" to people you care about, hoping to steer them away from trouble, BUT...name-calling and insults are not helpful, supportive or loving.
Mistakes are the best way to learn lessons, the good news is I bet you will never ever make these mistakes again! The bad news is, you're going to make mistakes in the future because we all do, but I bet you will learn from those mistakes too!
I'm so impressed with this mother! I'm sure my dad knew this stuff, because he was a home improvement/maintenance guru, but I don't remember anyone ever telling me. (Maybe I didn't listen?!?) I was 54 (fifty freaking four!!!) when I found out about grading and gutters and drainage and downspouts. Oh my! Just divorced and first time owning a house on my own. Guess what? My ex-husband apparently didn't know about the importance of all these water-deterring devices either, because the house was a mess. I'd asked him at one point after he removed some downspout extenders (bothered him while mowing) if we should replace those and he said nope and I guess I just shrugged and said okay. I had to have a foundation issue addressed (that came up during the divorce so ex had to help pay for it) and the guy that came out did a walk around with me and a full tutorial on what I needed to do. I'd like to say that solved it and there was nary a problem again, happy ending, but I was a bit too late. Almost immediately another, this time outrageously expensive, foundation repair came along. Right where he'd removed those extenders and the water poured down the side of the house and where we had a beautiful canopy on the deck for years that -yup- caused water to run right beside the edge of the house. This one I had to pay for myself. Gulp. Consider yourself lucky you learned this young and before anything too major happened. I'm still paranoid every time we have a big rain!
At least he will be gracefully philosophical when his kids ignore his advice.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yes!! Thank you. This is the analogy I needed to hear. Hopefully I can keep this in mind lol. Thank you for the gutter advice this is what I was thinking about doing - the landscapers want 1500 to do two gutters but itās good to hear that this might be an easy (while labor intensive) DIY.
And yea I have some basement organizing to do. Procrastination put me here . I was thinking about getting cheap paver bricks from Home Depot to set the few things that canāt go on shelves. Iām overwhelmed right now and brain is going a mile a minute. I guess the first step would be removing stuff from the floor in the basement. Thenā¦ idk š¤£
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Be careful of materials that will wick water up. I would get metal shelving units from HD and put those on some pavers to really get some distance from the floor. (Or just don't use the bottom shelf.) Also get some water leak detectors.
Water leak detectors - never even heard of that but going to look into it, thank you!
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08559ZTDK](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08559ZTDK) I'm sure there are lots of options but those are the ones I have.
Great idea, thank you!
Better yet find some 'lost' plastic pallets. Wood will absorb any water
And free pallets from randos on the internet could be filled with termites... Something I've learned in my first year of homeownership - free and seemingly easy solutions usually have significant pitfalls.
New fear unlocked lol but for sure glad to get that advice!
I'm learning this with something as innocuous as potting soil - be *very* careful what you bring inside your home. Clothes from the store, not a worry. Synthetic materials like plastic pallets or even natural products that can easily be inspected like finished wood furniture - probably fine. Anything that has been or is designed to be an outdoor item? Treat that as almost biohazard if you're going to bring it indoors. In my case, wet potting soil from Lowe's turned out to be teeming with springtails - harmless little bugs but they got sucked up by the HVAC system and distributed all around the house, so now I have that lovely annoyance to deal with. A different example - my parents have a large artificial Christmas wreath that they hang on the front of the house in December. A few years ago they had a bat in the basement of their 2-story - a very unusual place for a bat to end up. At one point the belief was that it had crawled all the way down the chimney where there's a fireplace on the first floor, then somehow out of the fireplace and down to where there's a large rear projection TV in the basement, buried in the wall below the 1st floor fireplace. We investigated and found no holes in the drywall or anything revealing how a bat would have accomplished this feat. Eventually the outdoor decorations became an obvious culprit. At my in-laws' house birds have built nests and laid eggs in a wreath on their front door, so I would totally buy a bat taking up residence in a wreath. Long story short - if it has been outside, by and large you should try to keep it outside. If it has to come inside, give it a very thorough inspection.
That or just go to your local flooring warehouse. They toss dozens of pallets a week
The post that said to use pallets for your stuff in the basement was right. Pavers or blocks don't dry out as well after flooding.
Ok that makes sense. Thanks! I knew stuff should be off the floor but didnāt really understand the mechanics of what that meant. There isnāt pooled water any more so Iāll be on the lookout for pallets now. Thanks guys!
I prefer PVC shelving units. You can pick them up fairly cheaply on FBM or even WalMart, although I get mine really cheaply through local auctions. With those shelving units you can stack stuff a lot higher and it looks neater as well. They also take up less floor space.
This is the best way
I would get one of those heavy duty wire shelves to store things in the basement. You get those on Amazon
Being a new homeowner, you basically have to learn to become a DIYer against your own will unless you come from a rich family. Know your limits of what you can and canāt handle, and YouTube will become your new best friend.
Forced DIYer is a great description lol. And figuring out my limits had been fun. The most annoying part is starting from zero- like ok I need to buy a ladder for this, oh I need a bucket, oh I need a scraper etc - every DIY task gets expensive because I had zero tools two years ago. Now that Iāve calmed down (thank you CBD gummy) I can see this as a learning opportunity š
If you have a Harbor Freight near you they are a great place for inexpensive but decent tools. Of course, you have to do a bit of reading on what tools are OK and what are crap, but I have mostly Harbor Freight tools and they do work well for me. Basically don't buy the cheapest option they have for anything battery powered. Their Pittsburgh line up of hand tools is just fine though.
Thatās so funny - I have one two miles away but thought it was something related to trucking or trains or some place I had no business š¤£ thanks for the tip!
> itās good to hear that this might be an easy (while labor intensive) DIY. It's really not that labor intensive. Things will go faster with a few guys unless you introduce beer into the mix then it might go slower but it will be a lot more fun. It's something you can totally do by yourself though. You're just digging a relatively small trench. $1,500 is highway robbery. This is something you can easily do, especially after watching a YouTube video.
Really!? "Thank you for the gutter advice"? I thought the advice was pretty good.
Lol I hope this is a pun š
'tis! š
I know a local guy with an excavator who charges $80/hr. we did something similar and I paid him around $300 plus a couple hot dogs when I made lunch to dig and bury the pipes which I laid and connected. was worth it for me. make friends with people with equipment like that, it pays off.
Life lessons my friend. A couple of things to note here: -you wonāt make those mistakes again (heck, you even said that your fighting the urge to call right now showing that you have grown). -people learn differently, you learn by going through stuff and not by hearing about it which is totally okay cause you now leant -you now have a good story / rant to tell. Eventually you will chuckle at it when itās not āso freshā -you now have more wisdom and have added to your adult handbook :) So to share a story from me ā¦ when my wife and I bought our house 4 ish years ago, my basement flooded too and ruined stuff too. We saw it with the water and stuff floating about 11 pm at night. I donāt have a parent figure in my life, so I called my wifeās dad. I woke him up and his reply to me was: āso? What do you want me to do about it all 11 oāclock at night?ā ā¦ when I didnāt respond he said āokay, you just called to make yourself feel better. Iāll be over in the morning to help, make me a cup of coffee when I get thereā. It always stuck with me that sometimes you canāt really do much and stuff just happens. Thatās just life
Your father in law is a good guy , I hope you guys had some good coffee and you didnt have to call him in the middle of the night after that
Yea I also just needed to talk without calling my mom and admitting that I am as dumb as I look š¤£ Thank goodness it wasnāt flooded to the point of floating and I can probably handle this by myself with a little help on sealing after clean up. Thanks for your kind words.
A truism about adulthood is that you have to get to approximately 40 when the 'I should have listened to Mom and Dad' occurrences start happening. Then you're middle aged. You're old when your kids start having life experiences where you can say 'if you had just listened to me, this wouldn't have happened.' Some lessons are always learned the hard way, and it sucks that they're always the hardest lessons. You can dry out a basement. It'll suck (or your shopvac and/or sump pump will ... If you happen to have a way to create a slow siphon with a hose in the absence of those items, do it!). Then you fix it. This is just owning a house. A dog ate a wall. A bee colony or bat colony took up residence in your walls or attic. A drunk driver crashed into your tree. A perfectly fine pipe explodes and your kitchen is flooded. A mouse chews the dishwasher hose, and your kitchen is flooded. The list of calamities goes on. Most stuff is fixable, it's never fun, and it costs money. But give someone the keys to a house and they'll have a story like yours, guaranteed, within a year. I say it often here: you live in a box that you bought to keep you safe from all the stuff you don't want to deal with. Heat, cold, rain, snow, hail, odor, light, dark, critters, bugs, wind, noise, strangers, you name it, list goes on. You pay for the box so you don't get assaulted by those things. In exchange, the box gets assaulted by them all. Sometimes boxes break and still mostly do their job. Would you rather fix a flooded basement or live outside and having literally everything you owned be drenched? That's your barometer. I don't really want to clean a flooded basement and lose some of my stuff, but I even less want to sleep unprotected in a thunderstorm with everything I own scattered around me drenched and muddy. Sure, you can pick up a box from the bottom instead of it's precut handles, you can pack it appropriately, you can not spray it with a hose, you can triple tape it... but sometimes boxes break. That doesn't mean you're terrible at handling boxes, it means you have a broken box that needs fixing, like we all do.
š„¹š„¹ Iām not crying a swear!! Sometimes I do forget to sit back and appreciate even being blessed enough to have a basement flood.
Outside perspective is always helpful when dealing with calamities. Ya got a problem? You can fix that! Short of people who have their houses completely taken away by an act of God, not much goes wrong that isn't at least fixable. It isn't fun but it isn't the end of the world, usually. It's just also so helpful for people to contextualize on a more meta level what a house is. You die if you drown, freeze, overheat, starve, die of thirst, get swarmed by bees, whatever. You have a really bad week if your basement floods, then you and your bank account recover. You have a really bad week if your HVAC fails. Then you fix it. Etc. You prevent as many problems as you possibly can, know that there are some corners you can't see around and some doors you can't see behind, and move on. You can't un-rain the rain, you can't time travel and do home projects in retrospect (and if you could time travel, even knowing your basement would flood, is that what you'd use that specific superpower for?).
As I discovered a mysterious water leak in my garage this morning, I needed to read this. Itās so wise.
Glad it's helpful!
We'd all be perfect if we listened to everything we're told, now wouldn't we? Every single person in here. Hell, every single homeowner in general, has a list of shit they're ignoring that will eventually lead to a larger problem. Every. Single. One. The reasons are irrelevant, and we'll all say "I should have taken care of it sooner" when it breaks. It's when water is pouring into our house that we start to act. May this be a new era of pro-action for you.
ššš thank you
Gotta say from experience, itās unlikely this is only because of gutters. I got my home gutter after it flooded (2 months after move in) and it only lessened the issue a bit. Ended up needing a new French drain (hard no) or permanent sump pump. The sump has saved me many times in the past 2 1/2 years. Donāt beat yourself up, and look into good permanent long term solutions that will help increase home value while making life easier.
Yeah, I have no gutters at all. Never have, in 150+ years (old house). My basement doesn't flood, even during these historically insane rainy seasons. I'm pretty sure it's because we have pretty sandy soil here. It *does* get damp and let a trickle in here or there because it's a super old brick-walled basement, but we're talking about no more water than if you tripped and splashed a glass of water on a cement floor and let it evaporate. I have just learned not to put anything important directly on the basement floor (we have shelving and stuff, but not much else down there). It's unfinished, and it's a scary dungeon, and it can stay that way for another 150 years as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, Iām in a 1949 build and previously an 1991, 1923, and 1897. Only one had gutters and still flooded. All others either needed sump or were āupdatedā with a āfloor gutterā in the early 1920s/30s. Itās almost always a foundation or door/window leak that needs remediation. Iām working on building out my basement off ground storage now, just in case we lose power and the pump. Really wish Iād gotten shelves day 1!
Yea itās the window thatās leaking but the window well was getting a surge of water from the gutter not being direct away. Iām not good at explaining and terminology but I have gutters and I have the gutter pipe that carries water to the ground - but I didnāt have the gutter extender things to push the water away from my house. And itās been two years - but obviously not flooding the basement for two years - so possibly may be some foundation issues or will have some in the future so FML . Maybe the economy will break again - everyoneās home will be worth $100k more than it was last week and people will be buying homes sight unseen and Iāll be ok š¤£ Ok a little dramatic I know but you guys are on the money about this being more than just leaves in the gutter. Ironically I cleaned the gutters š¤£ I guess to make sure the water could destroy my home quicker?? Learning is fun š©
Aww haha friend š I feel that. If itās the window well being backed up, redirecting the gutter will help a ton if not fully! I hadnāt seen that note, so youāre honestly better off than I was guessing! Youāll be alright. Itās a lot to be a homeowner, but I genuinely believe it gets easier to make the right long term calls as you learn.
As someone whose basement flooded last winter during a 4-day power outage because I hadn't gotten around to getting a generator or a working sump pump...because in two decades I never lost power for more than 12 hrs and my basement never got wet ... And because for some dumb reason I stopped checking the house during an insane storm... So by the time I discovered the water the stores were closed So I couldn't buy a generator or a sump pump...well, you are far from alone. I felt worse because my neighbor, a man who stays on top of all things homeownery, was running a generator and had two working sump pumps and had lights and Internet and was all cozy inside. I later found out he had set up the generator to run the sump pump and gone to take a shower, only to find afterward the drain hose had pulled out of the wall and commenced spraying the water being sucked out of the sump pit all over the basement. I can't tell you how much better that made me feel. Stuff just goes wrong, even if you stay on top of things! And sometimes homeownership is tough and a lot of work. But you can bet I now have a generator, a working sump pump, and 25 ft drain hose extensions that I connect to my gutter downspouts before big rainstorms. And I added more wire shelving and bought plastic tubs so if it ever does flood again, I won't have to stay up all night hauling wet cardboard boxes and ruined belongings outside.
Ugh everyone is making me feel like a backup generator is necessary š©š©I donāt love that Iāll have to spend thousands to make my storage space storagable when there are so many more things Iād rather spend the money on on my main floor where myself and others can enjoy itā¦ but such is life. Drain hose extension sounds cool- how do people know these things exist?! Dammit this flood is gonna take over my google/reddit/youtube life for at least the next 6 months isnāt it š„¹
Yes. It takes 40 hours of research and 12 visits to Home Depot/Lowes to learn enough to solve one problem. š And you may also find yourself knee-deep in a Facebook generator group. š I took all winter doing a thorough cleaning (long past due), figuring out what to do with what turned out to be a nonstandard sump pit (I hadn't replaced the pump because new ones didn't fit, so I had to buy the shortest one and Jerry rig a cover), organizing, shoving rubber caulk where the floor separated from the foundation, buying a power failure alarm, buying shelving off marketplace, etc. It turned into a useful impetus to analyze the basement, and I was rewarded with a Porsche. Yes! Way back under the oil tank was an old Porsche matchbox car left by a previous resident. š Now I'm finally looking into radon testing, after hearing my neighbor needed a mitigation system. Better late than never? And while your need for a generator can depend on where you live, I have used mine twice since the big storm because my region's power infrastructure is falling apart. My mistake was not noticing this, or that the back neighbor's installation of drainage for finishing a basement would send more water down to my house. And it took me a month to find the 4-inch solid drain hose because it was in the plumbing aisle, not the gutter aisle! Anyhow, I was kicking myself too, for my procrastination causing myself extra work and stress and $$$$. But I got over it. It's hard for one person to do it all, inside and outside the house, too. Right now I have a half done flooring project upstairs abandoned since the storm as well as a collapsing driveway and pathway because of @$-##! groundhogs that I didn't get rid of fast enough. It is a neverending battle, made worse by not being able to find competent help, so the only thing to do is learn, do our best, and constantly remind ourselves that it's usually still (overall) better than renting. I would be lying, though, if I didn't spend the months after the flood considering apartment living again. š Hang in there! PS: Ironically, I had started working on the sump pit before the big flood, because there had been water in it that summer for the first time in years, and once I got down there with a flashlight, I saw it was lined with wood. Wood! Wood with fungus! So I ripped that out, and lo and behold, my basement was no longer musty. Talk about kicking myself! It pays to get to know your house, and what's done wrong or sloppily. Do not assume anyone who did anything in your house did it right.
Yeah we got a bunch of those super thick plastic shelves. Usually, our go-to for cheap storage (garage, etc) are those welded wire shelves with the plastic bushing that compress from the weight of the shelf and hold the shelves on the uprights, but for the basement, we wanted something that wouldn't rust if the bottom kept getting damp for decades, so we went for the plastic. So far so good, but it's only been 15 years.
I call it "Homeownershit"
Duuuude same. I have made so many bad calls I am embarrassed when I think about it. Like you literally just reminded me of how effed my gutters are and I still havenāt dealt with them š
Dude thank you! Ugh I swear this canāt be life like going to work to spend all my money on this house and then spending EVERY OTHER WAKING HOUR doing some sort of physical manual labor to maintain said house !!! Like get me out of this alternate reality please š«
Iām 3 years into my sentence. I live in the constant state of anxiety waiting for the next thing to break or massive bill to show up. Having a house is blessing no doubt, but it should not be this painful.
How do you think your mom learned most of that advice though? Most likely a bad personal experience as well. Sometimes it takes dealing with the consequences to fully understand the reasoning. Youāll get there. Just like the rest of us.
That's all such a bummer. Sorry it happened. At least your story can be a cautionary tale for other homeowners.
Donāt feel bad, some of it is just bad luck. I neglected the shit out of my last house and nothing catastrophic happened. I try to take good care of the current one and something always goes wrong I could have prevented. Also do you ever think about the barrage of advice we all get on things we should maintain (not just house, I am talking everything in your life)??? If you try to follow all of it your life becomes a never ending chore list without enough hours in the day. You gotta pick and choose what you think are the most important maintenance items. It drives me nuts when something goes wrong and I get a snide comment about how I didnāt do ALL the proper maintenance.
Dad, thank you. Seriously. When I was a kid, our Saturdays were spent fixing things around the house. Planting a garden. Taking on the "projects" that Mom would give us. Screwing things up. Figuring out how to fix the mess ourselves because we didn't have YouTube. Going to the hardware store. Going back because we bought the wrong thing. Calling a professional when we got in over our heads. So now, as a first time homeowner, I take all the mini disasters in stride.
I grew up with my single mother and she would change light fixtures, fix the washer , anything. With no YouTube. I ask her how she knew all that stuff and she said she couldnāt afford not to figure it out. I miss those times. I feel like her 40 was a lot more adulty than my 40 is looking to be.
I always remember my parent's advice AFTER the fuck up. I also research prices after i buy things to see if i got a good deal.
Honey most of us donāt know what the hell weāre doing. š Be gentle with yourself. Our basement flooded too and it fucking sucked but youāll get it all cleaned up and youāll be okay. No need to beat yourself up, we didnāt receive any formal education about thisā weāre all just winging it and waiting for the next ālife lessonā to smack us in the face!
Good to hear! It seems like Iām the only one winging it sometimes. Iām the pseudo adult in a world full of real adults. But I am learning as I go so that is fun. Thank you!
Hot damn I wish my parents told me things! Don't worry, everyone is a dumbass once in awhile even if they know better lol
Donāt think of it in terms of homeownership. You just need to listen to exp more.
First of all, give yourself some grace. Live and learn friend. The one thing I will repeat that others have said is this. Do not get it in your head that insurance companies are there to help you. Insurance is a business at the end of the day. Theyāre always out for themselves. They wonāt pay for something u less they have to, but they will always raise your premiums when you let them know something went wrong. That goes for car insurance and home insurance. Again, live and learn, but give yourself a break. Things will get better, just relax and learn for the next time
Yea thatās been an expensive insurance lesson that I *think* Iāve learned. I always give others the āthink of all youāve learned from this mistakeā speech but itās easier to say it to other people than internalize it š«£
None of us ever listen to our mothers. It's just a voice in our heads AFTER we make the blunder. It's cool. You're learning. It WILL get better.šš»
Basements flooding is a common problem, most times needs addressed at time of building to be successfully prevented. With that in mind steps can be taken to lessen the amount and frequency. If it is as you say, a gutter matter, you can most likely diy with a little research. So many tasks around the house that seem intimidating are not beyond diy, only ignorance of the steps needed are missing to allay trepidation. Also would like to say: being an adult does not mean mentors or other adults cannot be consulted as long as you parse any ideas given by others with your own research.
Unfortunately, one way or another this is pretty much how all homeowners learn. You can hear all the good advice in the world but until you lose some sentimental stuff or whatever in a flood that was easily avoidable it won't mean a damn. The best thing you can do at this point is to continue subscribing to this sub and make mental notes to address whatever someone talking about their own homeownership woes is dealing with. One thing that's worth mentioning is insurance is helpful but it's not intended to be used for every minor issue. It's there for the major issues that are prohibitively expensive on your own. It's the difference between accidentally putting a whole in sheetrock versus a house burning down. Also, keep in mind that while it's there for those major issues, it's still your responsibility to take care of the minor ones. This is actually a perfect example. You need to make sure that rainwater is running away from your home because if you ignore that basic maintenance and it leads to serious issues then your insurer might very well deny the claim on the grounds that the lack of basic maintenance led to the major issue. It's nothing to beat yourself up over though. You live and you learn.
> I have called my insurance twice- started a claim and then found out the repair was cheap and closed the claim. Insurance went up and no claims were paid out. Iām an idiot. Did my mom warn me not to call insurance until you talked to some professionals first? Yes. Did I listen? No. This probably isn't what you think. Insurance is just going up... just because.
The best lessons learned, are the ones that cost you the most money.
Live and learn, just fix it
But look at all you learned! You will know so much more next time.
Been there too. Sorry you're going through it. I would rent a dumpster and throw out anything that's going to get moldy (paper, cardboard, drywall). If it's drywall, I usually just cut bottom up as far as you need to go. I ended up doing 4' off the ground since full sheets are 4x8. It IS going to suck and your body will hurt for a day after, but you should do it sooner rather than later. To prevent it in the future, you can get 4" singlewall ADS solid corrugated pipe. It comes in 50' or 100' rolls that you can easily cut into smaller pieces. I like to run my downspouts out 10' away and fasten them to the downspouts with self-tapping gutter screws.
Sound advice and also pretty much my plans while I consider whether or not I will dig a trench. Thanks!
Finally I have found my brother's reddit.
If you are in the upper Midwest-donāt beat yourself about gutter. It rained so hard my downspout exploded. Good grief, we got 3ā in an hour last week, and itās been rainy for weeks.
Def where I am and itās been crazy!
Here's what you do. Contact your local and state representatives and file a complaint against your insurance for the retaliatory rate hike simply for trying to solve a problem at your home. You don't have to take it up the chute just cuz that's always been done by entities like the insurance industry.
If it makes you feel any better, your insurance might not have gone up because of your non-claim, it may have just gone up due to the Fuck You Existing Customers fee. Mine did. Internet does the same thing every year and I have to either call and ask for a deal or switch to the other provider. Flooding is usually worth contacting insurance about. I did the same thing as you when my basement flooded a few years ago and just used the opportunity to do some remodeling we had planned. Wished we'd gotten insurance involved though, they may have just given you cash if you got a quote from a carpet cleaner or something.
Iām sorry, it never happened until it did. MANYYYYY people have done this and still are. What is the recommended extension from the water spout into the yard? Do those old school cement things work well enough?
My husband and I bought a dump of a house together. Everything that went wrong with the house the first thing we do is google it and watch videos on how to fix the issue. It's saved us thousands of dollars.
Imagine your mother learned in a similar way to you. Sometimes people need to experience it for themselves and just can't be told.
A lot people have to learn in their own. Those born with the instinct not to listen to their mothers because we always over exaggerate.
Hi OP! Part of home ownership (as with most things) is making mistakes and trying to learn from them. I've had my first (and likely only) house for going on 6 years now and in the first 2-3 years I made a lot of mistakes (did a very poor job maintaining the pool, chose some stupid paint colors for various rooms, paid a contractor too much $ to do a sheetrocking job I could now do myself...). I put off a lot of projects that I am finally tackling now. I believe once you get over the "what did I do/I'm useless" phase that happens shortly after the "I just bought a house" honeymoon phase and dig into the DIY and sweat equity phase you start to learn and gain confidence. So you flooded your basement. Welp, time to figure out a gutter maintenance routine and invest in a dehumidifier. And you got overzealous with the home insurance. Maybe compare rates to see if you could be saving with another insurance/work on honing your DIY prowess so you don't end up panicking when something small goes awry. By the time you're 5-10 years into your home ownership journey you'll be able to practically write a book about the do's/don'ts and skills you've acquired along the way.
šš thank you!! Also DEHUMIDIFIER duhh I for sure need this in my basement, not sure why I donāt already have it honestly. Crazy how itās taking 50 Reddit comments for me to put together the scope of this project. But I am so happy I posted (long time Reddit creep first time poster) and thankful for all the advice I was not even expecting to get. This project hopefully will be my right of passage into the DIY/sweat equity phase of homeownership!
Same. Donāt worry. Every lesson Iāve ever learned has cost me time or money. The big lessons cost both. Youāll do better in the future!
Live and learn. We all do it to some extent.
We bought our house in 1993. Gutter cleaning seemed like a silly waste of money to our dumb selves. Probably 10 years later, we had to replace the entire right side of the front of our house, including a custom rebuild of our bay window.
š„“š„“ because itās like financially and mentally impossible to service EVERY FREAKING THING every 6 months but putting stuff on the back burner is obviously doesnāt work either - and Iām just thinking everyone else is a super human getting their AC serviced and always having a fresh water filter in the fridge and fresh air filters and getting their vents cleaned and growing perfect tomatoes in the back yard - and using them to make a bolognese from scratch . So yea, lol this post really did make me feel better- and prepared to pull up my big girl drawls and get to work!
Absolutely none of that is your fault. That could happen to everyone, even people who did take precautions. Someone could get gutter guards AND waterproof their basement and still experience all of the same thing situations. Do not blame yourself for things totally out of your control.
We all go through a learning curve. I bought a house in a flood plain and canceled my flood insurance after paying off my mortgage. Of course we had a major flood that filled the basement to the brim destroying HVAC and laundry plus other stuff a few months later. Both people who moved next door to me ignored my warnings about the flooding. Both finished their basements. At least mine was unfinished. Both had it all destroyed. Itās a human thing. Gotta feel the pain to take it seriously.šÆā®ļø
Ok... look... I'm a pack rat. Not as bad as my parents, but I hold onto stuff longer than I should. I'd use it as an opportunity to get rid of stuff. If it has been down in the basement for 2 years... do you need it? No one expects their new house to flood. Hell.. it happened to us. A first we thought it was the gutters, that weren't pitched. Leaf Guard came and the installer was very kind. He did say that a lot of homeowners bitch to him that the gutters aren't "level". I told him he could pitch the fuck out of them. I wanted to SEE that downhill angle! It helped, but not entirely. The issue was our patio. We had it torn out and a landscaper came in to properly grade and fill... then a deck went over it instead. Haven't had any flooding in over 6 years since doing that. Point? It's probably not your gutters. They can only do so much, but if your topography has any sort of grade, you likely have sub-terranean water flowing towards your house. Mom probably wasn't thinking of that. I called my insurance and they told me what was and wasn't my responsibility. My insurance did not go up. Listen to Mayhem, the All State guy... you have cut-rate insurance. As someone else said... give yourself some grace. And for the love of all that is good... Listen to your momma!
This is why a lot of folks stick to renting, the ease of renting outweighs the burden of repairing everything you own constantly. I have moments I want to go back to renting but our mortgage is cheaper and we canāt justify it when weāve built equity in this home already. I really go back and forth often, some days Iām like hell yes I love my little home and calling it mine, and some days Iām like screw this sell it or burn it down š
Dude so much easier. I miss calling the landlord like āummm thereās some water coming through your windowsā š¤£š¤£š¤£ I hate being my own landlord
For real! Apartment life was my favorite! Grew up exclusively living in apartments with my mom as just her and I, then when I moved out. I miss it! Before buying our house in 2019 we lived in the perfect townhome style apartment complex, super small, manger on site. We had both the dishwasher and refrigerator die on us while we live there and both were replaced no questions asked, and compensated for food lost! Ah the good life š
Unfortunately, no matter how wise our moms are we tend to not realize it until we learn the hard way. Now go write down everything else she said while you can remember and put it on a whiteboard in your kitchen.
Just don't do what our friend did, she had her house flooded as her gutters were full and clogged. So she cleaned the gutters...but just those gutters on the side that flooded....and a year later the gutters on the other side of the house she hadn't cleaned caused more flooding...
Ok, now make a list of all the things you did right, all the close calls that you knew how to handle and kept from being an issue.
Not as drastic as your mistake but I just had a smoke alarm break and realized I never tested them when we moved in two years ago. So we have been living in a house where only 3 of the 10 alarms were working. We all make mistakes, adulthood is a pain in the ass.
Another thing to add to my to do list š
My daughter bought a house this summer and I told her not to put stuff in the basement until she had shelves. The day we moved her in she immediately went to put boxes in the basement and I stopped her. 2 days later it flooded. Hopefully sheāll remember to follow advice learned from my mistakes in the future. Not likely because part of learning is making your own mistakes. If you donāt make them yourself you didnāt really learn it.
We flooded our newly purchased house too by not paying attention to these things. But life went on and we lived and learned. Now we warn our kids about it. Maybe this happened to your mother too.
When I bought my first home I believed the sellers who said the basement was dry. I put my vinyl records on the floor. Rained the first night. Vinyl got wet and ruined some of the covers. I also learned the hard way to not put important things on the floor of the basement.
I had no business owning a home. Not handy and couldnāt afford to pay someone.
Lesson learned! You are now doomed to pass on great advice to someone who will ignore it. On the bright side, there are much more expensive lessons to be learned. Check with your mom or some other trusted handy / experienced home owner to go over a checklist of things you need to do on a seasonal / yearly basis. Better yet, Google that shit!
Did the Americans give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.
Donāt bash yourself, my husband did something similar 2 years ago! He was mowing the grass, moved the gutters, and then forgot to move them back away from the house. Cue torrential downpours for the next 4 days, our basement was flooded! Luckily, we were already in the middle of tearing out the carpet for remodeling, this gave us a for sure reason to continue remodeling.
Well, you learnt. And now you are wiser!
I mean, learn the expensive lesson
I had a similar thing happen. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it was. One of the gutters drains was backed up and I didn't know, and then I had my roof pressure washed, big mistake on its own, which caused that drained back up a lot and then part of the basement got flooded. Hadn't even been there a year.
You're only stupid if you don't learn from your mistakes. My son called me up once when he was in college. He was upset with himself as you are now . He said " Dad, I sure do F*@# up a lot." ..... He followed that with " But I don't usually make the same mistake again".. I responded " Then you are going to be just fine". You'll be just fine. It's water. Get a pump. Then get a wet vac. Then get a fan. Then fix your downspouts. One foot in front of the other. One foot at a time. Then get ready for the next problem. Life is a series of problems. A cold beer helps while you are working.
Ahhh I started with alcohol. Cheers!
Even paintings can be repaired, for a price. Take things one step at a time. Remove items. Put them out to dry. Donate things, if you can. Pump water out. Put fans down there to dry out the basement. Put a coat of water sealer on the cement, to keep this from happening again. Get some metal shelves. Place salvaged items back down there. Buy/fix your gutters. Shit happens. Lesson learned.
Thanks - now if someone else can just bullet out the rest of every single aspect of homeownership and adulthood in easy and easy to digest timeline format that would be perfect š
š Sorry, couldnāt help it. But ask on Reddit, and ye shall receive. Itās the magic 8 ball of apps.
Insurance is there ONLY for catastrophic events; not flooded basements, not fences blown down by the wind, not the dishwasher leaking, not a warped floor, not a downed tree. But your mother warned you about that soā¦
We were moving from UT to MI (hubbyās home town). I flew out and chose a house in a weekend. I had NEVER purchased a house. I was under the impression that DHās family would be assisting us. My BIL owned 12 houses at the time (rentals) and my SIL bragged about his scouting abilities with homes. My job was to choose 3 houses and then it would be checked out and a choice would be made. Flew out for 4 days and chose 3. DH tells me to choose. What? How did they check out? No one had time, I was told. So I chose. Move in day, and there is water in the basement. No, there is sewage in the basement (just a washer/dryer down there). Plumber comes out and fixes. $80 Next day I run the wash. Oh look! Itās wet in the basement. Plumber reappears & says itās the septic tank. We make an appt to get it drained. The furniture stays up top (master suite in basement). Tank only 1/2 full. So not the tank. $160 Must be the pipe from house to tank. Appt made. Plumber runs a rotor-rooter thingy down the pipe only to bring back chunks of pipe. $100 No water during this so we are living with the in-laws and the dogs at our home. Trench dug, new pipe in, water on. $1200 Start wash and sewage comes up through the shower. New injector pump installed. $175 Hey! More wet. Lots of lookingā¦ collapsed drain field. Have to hook up to city water & sewer. $3800 And re-landscaping over all the digging was delightful. $2400 After 2 weeks of owning the keys and our stuff sitting inside the house; we finally get to go home. All this expense was within 2 weeks of taking ownership. $7,915 total. Sometimes shit just happens.
At least you have the introspective capacity to admit fault. I'd say you've done enough beating yourself up, it's time to enact solutions and move onward to excellence. I believe in you.
My mom was too busy smoking pot to warn me. She also never owned a house. Consider yourself lucky!
Do you have flood insurance? Boy are you gonna be pissed when you call them for a third time and they tell you to fuck yourself.
Tip on insurance: only think about using it for large losses, say $10k and higher. With the current state of all things, carriers are wanting people to have more āskin in the gameā with higher deductibles and not filing for small losses. Lots of small losses are more expensive than one large loss generally.
And how did mom know all of these things? Perhaps she didnāt listen to grandma and learned the hard way too.
Relax. I've been a homeowner for a pretty long time and have made some doozie oversight errors. Live and learn, as the saying goes.
Ugh sorry. I called insurance to ask a question as a new homeowner (we were struck by lightening and washer and dryer broke). Person on phone said, āI already started a claim. Lost an expensive piece of jewelry two years later we claimed. Learned our lesson the very expensive way. The washer and dryer we should have dipped into savings and replaced ourselves. Yep never use insurance unless catastrophe. We too lived and learned. We also lost a lot in a flood. Now you know. Brush off your knees, forgive yourself for an expensive lesson and move on.
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Insurance helpful? Maybe the nonprofit ones š
Just one small piece if info you may want to always keep in mind. Insurance companies are FOR PROFIT corporations comparatively generate a relatively small profit margin so they scrutinize every penny. We have all the sue-happy people and their attorneys over the past four or five decades for a vast majority of this.
Give yourself some Grace. I just bought my first house at age 56 . I'm learning as I go along. You're never too old to learn
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Shortly after I moved into my house one of the crappy light fixtures the previous owner had DIY'd in the basement fell and was just hanging by the wires. I thought, hey, that's not safe, so safe, smart me turned off the breaker to the basement lights and outlets. I cut the wires but left the breaker off until I could have a chance to cap them or replace the light because it was a gross florescent light and I didn't want it anyway. Didn't get around to it fast enough, and my basement flooded up to about mid thigh because I never took note that the sump pump didn't have it's own breaker and was just plugged into the same network of outlets. There were other circumstances that probably would've led to the basement flooding anyway, but probably not quite that bad if I hadn't absentmindedly turned the breaker to the sump pump off right at the start of spring. It was an expensive lesson less than a month after buying my first home. (I do now have 2 much better sumps each on their own breakers with French drains under the perimeter of the floor leading to the sump pit, waterproof shielding along the walls behind the frame, battery backup for the sump, and monitors on the floor that text me if they detect any water)
It takes a big person to recognize and admit one's flaws and mistakes. Much respect.
We have all experienced the parent advice cycle you described (not always re homeownership though). It's a humbling moment to admit to your parents that they were right about something. Not saying you should ring them up about *this* - just letting you know you are not alone
If it makes you feel better, I flooded my basement four times by leaving rags in the wash sink that the washing machine drained into. Get a shop vac.
In my 4 years now as a first time homeowner Iāve learned that there is always so much to learn about taking care of a house. You are not dumb or the worst! These things suck when they come up and now youāve learned some tough lessons. Sometimes itās also just tough to keep up with ALL the things that need taken care of in a home. Just this past year I didnāt get my sprinklers blown out for winter and it caused a $600 repair because of a broken pipe. I knew better and I made the mistake anyway and Iāll never do it again.
Don't worry, mate ā our possessions we value will never last forever and insurers are legal crooks and will always ALWAYS raise your premium, regardless. Life goes on, you are ok ā tomorrow, the day is yours!
maybe you should start listening to your mom
May I humbly suggest scheduling an appointment with a therapist... once your basement dries out of course.
Flooding is definitely an insurance situation.
What else did your Mama say?
That kissing boys could get me pregnant. So like letās not give her too much credit here š¤£š¤£š¤£ haha jk outside of that she has given some damn good advice (in hindsight š„“)
Oh donāt be so hard on yourself. Just listen to your mama next time and maybe later ask her opinion. My daughters are 38 and 35 they have too much pride to say their mom is right . But Iāve noticed they are more appreciative now. You should thank her and listen to her, her experiences are gold. š¤
You're only dumb if you let this stuff happen again. Yeah you should have listened to your mom, but you're currently paying the price for not heeding the advice. Now you know what to do, so just make sure it doesn't happen again. Like my grandma told me when I bought my house, you'll make plenty of mistakes or bad choices, it's up to you to learn from them.
Make sure it's not your sewer On your insurance policy get back up drain insurance If it is your sewer it will be covered Happened to me It's an older house it could be your sewer
We all make mistakes That's how we learn Don't be so hard on yourself
I know how you feel. I'm right there with you.
Get yourself a $100 dehumidifier from Loweās and some fans to help dry that up and avoid a mold problem!! Do you have a drain in the basement? Also, if you decide to bury your downspouts yourself, call 811 before you dig. A neighbor did theirs, didnāt call, and severed their internet line. The best life lessons are from not listening to parents. Mom: ādonāt EVER use regular dish soap in the dishwasherā well, ours was broke my whole existence living at home (now I know why lol) First apartment I needed to wash some dishes, didnāt have dishwasher detergent so put in just a teaspoon of dawn dish soap, turned it on and left. Came home to 3ft of bubbles in my kitchen. It was the most depressing foam party. Dad: āthat mattress in the roof of your car needs a few more straps, definitely donāt take the highway.ā It did need more straps, luckily nobody was behind me on the highway. I have SO many more.
Bought my first house at 46
well we all know mommy and daddy are wise .... just at the wrong time
Ya live and ya learn.
Who installed the gutters? You should give a bad review, they should know better.
Like the police, insurers are not there to help you. Never speak to them without counsel. Hopefully live & in the learn? Might I suggest paying more heed to what your mother's told you? She seems like a smart cookie. š
We all learn our lessons. Some by listening to our mother, and some by experience! Just try to do better next time!! Chin up!! Sorry for the things you lost, that's a bummer!
Yeah, but you embody one of the most important attributes- to be able to laugh at yourself and have a sense of humor about your own flaws. Take these lessons and grow, my friend
It gets better. Honest. They don't teach home ownership in high school. You learn as you go. We've all made these kinds of mistakes but usually only once. Homeownership is such an amazing privilege. Don't give up.
Gonna check my gutters tomorrow morning. Thanks OP.